Dissecting

My mother, she floats around in my head. I found myself sorting a drawer of thread yesterday, arranging it by color, because I'd gone looking for a spool of white thread and thought there wasn't any, because the five spools of white thread had disappeared in the hodgepodge. My mother had her thread organized by color. Why do I have so much brown thread? I hate brown.

She was clever and thrifty, my mother. When I was cleaning out my closet last month, I came across a straight blue dress that I'd loved and worn well. I remembered that its back slit had once torn at the seam, as they are wont to do. I checked to see if the seam had been repaired, and found that my mother had fixed it, using a bit of ribbon from a box of fancy chocolates in lieu of ordinary, purchased, twill tape.



I put the dress back in my closet. How could I not?

Moky had a basement full of stuff. Tools and oddments and broken telephones and a plethora of picture frames and fourteen kinds of glue. What you needed could always be found down there in the cellar. She had several old dissecting pins - a straight pin with a wooden handle, in case you missed the joys of a fetal pig in high school biology - because they were excellent for those times when you need to put the tiniest drop of Elmer's glue in a little hole. At some point after she was limited to the first floor of the house and no longer gluing things back together, I rummaged up a dissecting pin, needing it for something. She told me I could borrow it - but that I had to bring it back. I never did. In fact, even then, I knew I never would, because she was past dissecting pins and I need them now.